Monster Crown: Sin Eater is set in Crown Nation, an island nation ruled by the Lord Taishakuten and his loyal and malicious band of superbeings known as the Heavenly Kings. You play as Asur, a regular farmboy whose brother is murdered in front of his eyes by one of the ruler's malicious minions. Asur promptly sets out on a mission of vengeance that will pits him against the rulers of the land — in addition to a threat that looms over the entire nation.

Monster Crown: Sin Eater leans heavily into its Pokemon: For Adults aesthetic. Despite being about collecting cute monsters, the plot is pretty heavy, with heavy emphasis on the darker side. For example, Asur's brother is violently and bloodily decapitated on-screen by an insect-woman who allegedly gets a sexual thrill from murder. It's that kind of experience. To the game's credit, it handles the subject matter better than the first game did, and there is some genuinely interesting world-building and storytelling, including some non-linear plot choices. It didn't quite hit the mark for me, but it's very easy to imagine it being something that catches one's interest if they wanted a Pokemon game where Team Rocket was threatening instead of cartoonishly incompetent.

As you'd expect from a monster trainer game, Sin Eater has an incredibly diverse lineup of monsters. There are about 200 base types of monsters in the game, most of which can be found in a number of different variations. Monsters can be bred together, which allows you to create a new version of the monster that inherits stats from one or both of its parents but starts at level 1. Alternately, you can try to fuse monsters together, which starts you off with a higher-level monster. It can create unique monsters you can't get via fusion, but it means you have to sacrifice both of your hard-trained monsters. Each monster also tends to have a unique passive benefit and passive defect, such as being more durable but gaining half bonuses from speed boosts.

Unlike Pokemon, Sin Eater has a fairly basic type chart. Each of the five types in the game is weak to one type and resists another, while a crown type exists (primarily for bosses) that is neutral to everything. Most monsters in the game can be heavily customized to be any type or have attacks from multiple types. Rather than optimizing for one specific type, you'll want to mix things up, especially since instead of per-move PP like Pokemon, you have per-type "mana" instead. If you load up your monster with nothing but Will-type moves, you could very easily run dry during a fight and have nothing else to use.

For the most part, combat feels very familiar to fans of Pokemon. You throw out your chosen monster, and they'll fight the monster you're facing in turn-based combat. You'll want to swap monsters based on the types and attributes of your foes. Don't mistake this for things being simple. The game has a massive number of skills with lots of interesting attributes, like unique buffs, status effects, and interesting interactions with monster abilities. There's clearly a lot of thought and care put into the combat system, and it's a darn solid one.

One interesting feature in the combat system is the ability to crown attacks. When fighting, you build up a synchro meter. By spending this synchro meter, you can use crown versions of attacks that are more powerful, have additional effects, or otherwise have special attributes. At maximum synchro, you can engage special transformations to boost your power more. However, synchro builds relatively slowly, and many attacks can actually drain it from both you and enemies, encouraging you to balance gathering synchro with spending it to get the most out of your attacks. This is especially important in the boss battles, where proper synchro usage is the difference between victory and defeat.

The only flaw I found in Sin Eater's combat comes from its freeform nature. There are so many different ways to build, power up, and power-level your monsters — in addition to the fact that the game's areas don't have level scaling — that it can be incredibly easy to overpower all but the toughest opponents just by engaging with the game's mechanics. Once you can punch above your weight class, which is easier than it sounds, you'll be able to create an incredibly powerful team with minimal effort. There is a harder difficulty mode that alleviates this somewhat, but it may have been better to institute some scaling to make it more difficult to super-level your monsters early on.

That said, battling monsters is surprisingly fun and engaging. Most monsters appear in the overworld and respond in unique or different ways. For example, herbivore monsters tend to avoid you, while carnivores see you as a tasty meal. You can throw various kinds of food to distract or entice monsters, so you can lure in shy creatures for a chance to catch them or distract a too-tough enemy so you can run by and grab a rare item from behind them. As the game progresses, you'll unlock various skills that change how you interact with the world, and that's a nice way to keep things feeling fresh.

The actual "feel" of the game suffers a lot outside of the combat. I get that the developers were going for a freeform, open RPG, but the signposting for the game doesn't feel very good. There are enough tutorials that it seems like it's targeting newcomers, but it also seems designed around the assumption that you're familiar with monster trainer games, so it doesn't explain a lot of extremely basic mechanics or give you guidance on where to get started on your journey. It can be very easy to get stuck wondering where to go next.

This wouldn't bother me so much, but the way the game handles NPCs is annoying. Instead of the traditional RPG method of each NPC having a specific line of dialogue, most NPCs have a pool they draw from that changes every time you speak to them, and the pool is shared over multiple NPCs. That means the bulk of the NPCs in a given area will have the same few things to say, but occasionally, you'll run into one who has more, but it's never entirely clear if you're talking to an "important" NPC. Since so many of the game's clues and hints are tied to talking to NPCs, this leads to an annoying habit of seeing the same few hints over and over again. The aforementioned ease in over-leveling also comes into play, but it's easy to avoid combat generally enough.

In general, Sin Eater really feels like a game designed for people who grew up with Pokemon but want something that scratches a similar niche but is less hand-holdy. In some ways, it really works, but I also feel like it goes far enough in the opposite direction that it can potentially lose players who were looking for a more adult-oriented Pokemon game. A bit more effort on guiding and signposting things to players could go a long way without turning things into a guided, impossible-to-fail experience like some Pokemon games.

Monster Crown: Sin Eater is a great-looking game. It's intentionally evoking a Game Boy Color style of sprites and design, but it makes clever use of the lack of limitations to do things you never could see on a GBC. I'm not super fond of most of the monster designs — a problem I had with the original Monster Crown — but there are some standouts that looked cool enough that I didn't mind the somewhat lackluster lineup. The soundtrack is fantastic, and it does a lot to carry the atmosphere and feel of the game. It's also just fun to listen to on its own merits.

Monster Crown: Sin Eater is a big improvement over the original game. It feels more polished and fleshed out, and thankfully, far less buggy. It's a bit too rough around the edges to make it an easy recommendation, but if you're willing to work past some of the awkward segments, there is a solid monster trainer with a very fun combat system. The story is a bit hit-and-miss, and the freeform nature of the game isn't for everyone, but if you're looking for Pokemon with fewer guardrails, Sin Eater is for you.

Score: 7.5/10